a bolt sticking proud of the wood caught her chest, ripped some embroidery free and nearly dragged her into the thrashing timbers of the wheel. She just managed to keep her balance, broken fingernails scrabbling at the crumbling mortar behind her, teeth rattling with terror. She edged sideways, the clammy weight of her sodden petticoats clinging to her legs, water showering her, hardly able to breathe for the rotten acid stink of the river, one cheek scraping the bricks and her eyes squeezed almost shut, her skull fit to burst with the wheel’s clatter, hammer, whirr, its mindless rage.
And with a whimper she slid free, plunged face down into the river, floundered away sobbing, gurgling, half-swimming and half-crawling. She dragged herself up onto wet shingle on quivering hands and knees. For a moment, she wanted to kiss the ground. Until she saw the foamy filth that covered it.
She looked up, wiping her wet face on the back of one trembling hand.
The river slurped past, purple and orange and green with great blooms of unnatural colour from the dye-works upstream, bobbing with refuse, churned to stinking froth by dozens of hammering waterwheels. On the left bank was a kind of beach, streaked with tidemarks of dead brown weed, scattered with the city’s flotsam, with rags and skins and broken chairs and splintered glass and rusted wire and things too far rotted to be identified, all vomited up by the tortured waters and pecked at by flocks of birds bedraggled to winged rats.
A bent-backed woman was picking through the rubbish. She stared at Savine with wild eyes, stared at the sword she still held in one hand, then scuttled away with a bloated sack over one bloated shoulder.
Savine tottered up the shingle, sodden clothes clinging to her, slapping at her. She had to find something she could hide in. She stumbled along, turning over tree branches draped with rags, plucking up broken boxes, coughing at the stink of watery rot. Flies buzzed near a corpse – pig or sheep or dog, all matted hair and dirty bone.
Savine caught sight of something beside it. An old coat, one arm torn off and the lining hanging out like offal from a carcass, but she seized on it with far greater delight than she might have the latest silks in the clothiers of Adua. Those, after all, would not save her life. This might.
Her boots were so caked with dirt, no one could have told they cost more than a house in this neighbourhood, but her petticoats, filthy with river scum, heavy as armour with river water, might give her away. She fumbled at the fastenings with bloody fingertips, ended up sawing at them with her bent sword. She was left squatting on that vile riverbank in her clinging drawers. Her corset had to stay, ripped open and with one of the bones poking out. There was no way she could reach the laces.
She dragged the muddy coat over it, a thing not even the old beggar woman had seen any value in. It stank of rot with a chemical edge that caught in her throat, but she was grateful for it. At least no one could mistake her for that leader of fashion, that scourge of ballroom and parlour, that terror of inventors and investors, Savine dan Glokta.
She wanted nothing more, right then, than to burrow into the refuse and hide. But they would be coming for her. They knew who she was. Who her father was. They would have broken down the office door by now, found the loose board. They would be following her bloody trail, through the machines, past the wheel. Any moment now, they would find her.
She scraped muck from the beach, smeared it across her stubbled scalp, down her face. She hunched over the way the old beachcomber had, dragging one filthy boot behind her. She hardly had to pretend at a limp, she had wrenched her ankle somewhere and it was starting to throb. Everything hurt. She clutched the stinking coat around her, sword tucked out of sight inside, and hobbled away leaving two hundred marks’ worth of the finest Gurkish linen slashed and ruined on the shingle.
She clambered up a low wall, into the lane behind the mill. The lane where she had seen the armed men earlier. She felt something tickle her neck. By the Fates, her earrings! The gaudy ones Lisbit had picked. She plucked them out, was about to fling them away when she